Diary of the Fall Read online

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR DIARY OF THE FALL

  “Diary of the Fall is an example of what great literature can do: make the personal universal, and in so doing reveal new corners of human experience. In one small book, Diary of the Fall speaks of tradition, human cruelty, the Holocaust, immigration, the bond between fathers and sons, and how the past is never quite finished with us.”

  —Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore (Houston, TX)

  “Small in size and vast in depth, Diary of the Fall steadily challenges and occasionally delights. I admire Laub’s brave refusal to go easy on a horribly destructive paterfamilias who survived Auschwitz, and the quasi-experimental novel’s organization and style, a happy marriage of form and content.”

  —Elizabeth Alexander, University Bookstore (Seattle, WA)

  “This is an emotional hand grenade, one of the most devastating and powerful works I’ve read in some time. As Laub’s narrator traces his own downfall and delves into the trauma that ripples through his family history, I found myself propelled forward and backward with him, unable to resist this small novel’s terrible gravity or the narrator’s powerful honesty. Diary of the Fall is one of those rare books that doesn’t just hold your attention, it demands it. I simply couldn’t stop reading.”

  —Tom Flynn, 57th Street Books (Chicago, IL)

  “Three generations of Jews living in Brazil remember their lives. An old man locks himself in his study and fills notebook after notebook with memories of a life not as it was lived, but as he wishes it had been, and with no mention whatsoever about the central experience of his life: Auschwitz. His son, in turn, and with the onset of fast-approaching Alzheimer’s, rushes to fill his own notebooks with every memory he can dredge up, but almost entirely fixated on his father. And the grandson, when his turn comes, narrates this wonderful book, told in the form of his own diary, replete with references to the memoirs of his father and grandfather, and obsessed with an act of extreme cruelty, inflicted by himself on a schoolmate, when they were both thirteen. The rolling impact of atrocities is explored from year to year and generation to generation, and raises troubling questions about what it is to survive in the modern world.”

  —Conrad Silverberg, Boswell Book Company (Milwaukee, WI)

  “Brutal yet delicate, Laub’s novel asks what it means to be Jewish in the twenty-first century, and it attempts to understand man’s basic identity.”

  —Paris Review Blog

  “A gripping, thoughtful novel, fluidly translated … Laub beautifully retrieves the tragedy of the Holocaust from its scholarship, politics, and deniers, cutting to the bone of human life, its longings and limitations.”

  —The Independent

  “This riveting read challenges how we choose to tell others our life story and how events make us into the people we are.”

  —The Sun

  “The remarkable quality of the book resides in its construction … Diary of the Fall’s long ribbons of prose create a work of immense incantatory power.”

  —Literary Review

  “Diary of the Fall is utterly convincing. It’s an original and thought-provoking exploration of the way history casts its ripples through generations.”

  —Bookmunch

  “Laub’s prose is compelling, his ideas intelligent, and I devoured the book in a day. Let’s hope we see more of this fantastic Brazilian writer’s work in translation.”

  —Kate J. Wilson, One Day Perhaps I’ll Know Blog

  “Beauty resides, almost discreetly, in the poetic plot [and] inviting, flowing prose … Therein lies Laub’s art, a style that seems to touch things without leaving a mark, without oppressing or disfiguring what is written.”

  —Vox

  “Powerful.”

  —Irish Examiner

  “An absolutely impeccable writer.”

  —NoMínimo

  “The best Brazilian writer of the new generation.”

  —Terra Magazine

  “As with Milton Hatoum, in Michel Laub there is always … a subtle touch at the most dramatic moments.”

  —O Estado de S. Paulo

  “A courageous and staggering novel.”

  —NRC Handelsblad

  “Even while reading it for the second time, the story held me captive.”

  —De Groene Amsterdammer

  “[A] beautiful novel.”

  —Het Parool

  Copyright © 2011 by Michel Laub

  Originally published in Portuguese as Diário da queda by Companhia Das Letras, São Paulo, Brazil, in 2011.

  English translation copyright © 2014 by Margaret Jull Costa First published in English by Harvill Secker, London, in 2014.

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Laub, Michel, 1973–

  [Diário da queda. English]

  Diary of the fall / Michel Laub; translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-59051-651-5 (paperback)—ISBN 978-1-59051-652-2 (e-book)

  1. Identity (Philosophical concept) — Fiction. 2. Self-realization — Fiction. 3. Psychic trauma — Fiction. 4. Holocaust survivors — Fiction. 5. Jewish fiction. I. Costa, Margaret Jull, translator.

  II. Title.

  PQ9698.422.A93D5313 2014

  869.3’5 — dc23

  2014005574

  Publisher’s Note:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used ficticiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.1

  For my father

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Few Things I Know About my Grandfather

  A Few Things I Know About my Father

  A Few Things I Know About Myself

  Notes [1]

  A Few More Things I Know About my Grandfather

  A Few More Things I Know About my Father

  A Few More Things I Know About Myself

  Notes [2]

  Notes [3]

  The Fall

  The Diary

  About the Author

  A FEW THINGS I KNOW

  ABOUT MY GRANDFATHER

  1.

  My grandfather didn’t like to talk about the past, which is not so very surprising given its nature: the fact that he was a Jew, had arrived in Brazil on one of those jam-packed ships, as one of the cattle for whom history appears to have ended when they were twenty, or thirty, or forty or whatever, and for whom all that’s left is a kind of memory that comes and goes and that can turn out to be an even worse prison than the one they were in.

  2.

  In my grandfather’s notebooks, there is no mention of that journey at all. I don’t know where he boarded the ship, if he managed to get some sort of documentation before he left, if he had any money or at least an inkling of what awaited him in Brazil. I don’t know how long the crossing lasted, whether it was windy or calm, whether they were struck by a storm one night in the early hours, whether he even cared if the ship went down and he died in what would seem a highl
y ironic manner, in a dark whirlpool of ice and with no hope of being remembered by anyone except as a statistic — a fact that would sum up his entire biography, swallowing up any reference to the place where he had spent his childhood and the school where he studied and everything else that had happened in his life in the interval between being born and the day he had a number tattooed on his arm.

  3.

  I don’t want to talk about it either. If there’s one thing the world doesn’t need it’s to hear my thoughts on the subject. It’s been dealt with in the cinema. It’s been dealt with in books. Eyewitnesses have already recounted the story detail by detail, and there are sixty years of reports and essays and analyses, generations of historians and philosophers and artists who devoted their lives to adding footnotes to all that material in an effort to refresh yet again the world’s views on the matter, the reflex reaction everyone has to the word Auschwitz, so not for a second would it occur to me to repeat those ideas if they were not, in some way, essential if I am to talk about my grandfather and, therefore, about my father and, therefore, about myself.

  4.

  In the months prior to my thirteenth birthday I was studying to prepare for my bar mitzvah. Twice a week I went to the house of a rabbi. There were six or seven of us in the class, and we each took home with us a tape on which he had recorded extracts from the Torah sung by him. By the next class we were expected to know the whole thing by heart, and even today I can still sing that fifteen- or twenty-minute mantra without understanding a single word.

  5.

  The rabbi lived on his salary from the synagogue and on contributions from the families who attended. His wife had died and he had no children. During class he drank tea with sweetener in it. Shortly after the class began, he would pick on one of the students, usually the one who hadn’t done his homework, sit down beside him, speak to him with his face almost pressed to his, and make him sing each line and syllable over and over, until the student got it wrong for the second or third time, then the rabbi would thump the table and shout and say that he wouldn’t bar mitzvah any of us.

  6.

  The rabbi had long fingernails and smelled of vinegar. He was the only rabbi in the city who gave those preparatory classes. After the class, we would often have to wait in the kitchen while he talked to our parents, telling them how indifferent, undisciplined, ignorant and aggressive we were, and after this speech he would always ask them for a little more money. It often happened, too, that one of the students, knowing the rabbi had diabetes and had already spent time in hospital, where, due to complications, he had almost ended up having one of his legs amputated, that this student would offer to make him another cup of tea, adding sugar this time instead of sweetener.

  7.

  Almost all my schoolfriends were bar mitzvahed. The ceremony always took place on a Saturday morning. The birthday boy would wear the tallit and be called upon to pray along with the adults. Then there would be a lunch or a dinner, usually held in some posh hotel, and one of my schoolfriends’ favorite tricks was to put shoe polish on the door handles of the rooms. Another favorite trick was to pee in the boxes of hand towels provided in the gentlemen’s toilets. There was another trick too, although it only happened once, when it was time to sing “Happy Birthday,” and because that particular year it had become the custom to give the birthday boy the bumps, tossing him into the air thirteen times, with a group of boys catching him as he fell, like a fireman’s safety net — except that on the day in question the net disappeared on the thirteenth fall and the birthday boy crashed to the floor.

  8.

  The party where this happened wasn’t held at a posh hotel, but in the reception room of a building without a lift or a porter, because the birthday boy was also a scholarship boy and the son of a bus conductor who had once been spotted selling cotton candy in the park. The birthday boy had never had to resit a single subject, had never been to any parties, never been involved in a riot in the library, nor was he among the students who put a slab of raw meat in a female teacher’s handbag, and he certainly wasn’t amused when someone left a bomb behind the toilets, a bag of gunpowder attached to a lit cigar. When he fell he bruised a vertebra, had to stay in bed for two months, wear an orthopedic corset for a further few months and go to a physiotherapist during the whole of that time, on top of being taken to hospital and having his party end in a general atmosphere of perplexity, at least among the adults present — and one of the boys who should have caught him was me.

  9.

  A Jewish school, at least a school like ours, in which some students are dropped off in a chauffeur-driven car and others spend years being ridiculed, one of them having his packed lunch spat in every day, another being locked in the machine room during every break-time, and the student who was injured during his birthday party had already been the victim of such pranks, having in previous years been repeatedly buried in the sand — yes, a Jewish school is much like any other. The difference being that you spend your childhood being told about anti-Semitism: some teachers talk of little else, as a way of explaining the atrocities committed by the Nazis, which were a consequence of the atrocities committed by the Poles, which were an echo of the atrocities committed by the Russians, and you could add to this list the Arabs, the Muslims, the Christians and anyone else you care to name, a spiral of hatred that had its roots in feelings of envy for the intelligence, willpower, culture and wealth that the Jews had created despite all those obstacles.

  10.

  When I was thirteen, I lived in a house with a swimming pool, and in the summer holidays I went to Disney World and rode on Space Mountain, saw the Pirates of the Caribbean and the parade and the fireworks, and afterward visited the Epcot Center and saw the dolphins at Sea World and the crocodiles in Cypress Gardens and the river rapids in Busch Gardens and the vampire mirrors in the Mystery Fun House.

  11.

  When I was thirteen I had: a video game, a VCR, a shelf full of books and records, a guitar, a pair of roller skates, a NASA uniform, a stolen No Parking sign, a tennis racket I never used, a tent, a skateboard, a rubber ring, a Rubik’s cube, a knuckleduster, and a small penknife.

  12.

  When I was thirteen I had still never had a girlfriend. I had never been really ill. I had never seen anyone die or have a serious accident. On the night that the birthday boy fell I dreamed about his father, about his aunts and uncles and grandparents, who had all been there, about his godfather, who had perhaps helped pay for the party, even though all they provided was chocolate cake and popcorn and chicken croquettes and paper plates.

  13.

  I often dreamed about the moment of the fall, a silence that lasted a second, possibly two, a room full of sixty people and no one making a sound, as if everyone were waiting for my classmate to cry out, or even just grunt, but he lay on the ground with his eyes closed until someone told everyone else to move away because he might be injured, a scene that stayed with me until he came back to school and crept along the corridors, wearing his orthopedic corset underneath his uniform in the cold, the heat, the sun and the rain.

  14.

  If, at the time, someone had asked me what affected me most deeply, seeing what happened to my classmate or the fact that my grandfather had been imprisoned in Auschwitz, and by “affect” I mean to experience something intensely as palpable and ever present, a memory that doesn’t even need to be evoked to appear, I would have had no hesitation in giving my answer.

  15.

  My grandfather died when my father was fourteen. The image I have of him comes from half a dozen photographs, in which he is always wearing the same clothes, the same dark suit, the same hair and beard, and I have no idea what his voice sounded like, and I don’t even know if his teeth were white because in none of the photos is he smiling.

  16.

  I never knew my grandfather’s house, but some of the furniture from there, the armchair, the round table, the glass cabinet, ended up in the apartment where m
y grandmother went to live afterward. It was an apartment better suited to a widow who rarely went out, at most once a week to have tea at a friend’s house, a habit she kept up until the friend had to move into an old people’s home, where she spent five or ten years, during which time she broke a leg and then her pelvis and suffered at least three bouts of pneumonia, a heart attack and a stroke before she died.

  17.

  I once visited that home with my grandmother. It was right on the outskirts of the city. The rooms smelled of eucalyptus, and the building was surrounded by a green area with benches and flower beds, and from there we could see the nurses, the visiting relatives, the occasional uniformed care assistant, and sometimes a gentleman in a motorized wheelchair equipped with an oxygen cylinder. My grandmother and her friend discussed the latest TV soap, the violence reported in the newspapers, how people in the street were growing ever ruder and the cold days ever longer, and at no point in the conversation, nor in any conversation I had with my grandmother until she died, more or less as her friend in the home had done, except without a heart attack along the way, and the stroke she had was so massive that it spared everyone having to see her lying in bed during that eternity in which the person can neither speak nor move — at no point in her life did my grandmother mention my grandfather.

  18.

  I mean, sometimes she would say very obvious things, that my grandfather didn’t talk much, that he slept in long-sleeved pajamas even in summer, that when they were first married he would do fifteen minutes of exercises when he got up, and that he once fell off the ladder he would use to get into the loft, and I could continue that list until there were twenty items or perhaps even thirty, but at no point in all those years did she tell me the most important thing about him.